The crumbling walls of Saint-Petersburg, whose sinking back to mere matter is documented by Sasha Terebenin, are used as new basic material by Vadim Bo to create modern icons. Their relationship is well shown by the fact that the images make the most natural impression there where they have been taken from: on the walls of the courtyards of Saint-Petersburg.

The walls of the city were decorated with every kind of precious stone.
The first was jasper, the second sapphire,
the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald,
the fifth sardonyx, the sixth carnelian,
the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl,
the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase,
the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. (Rev 21:20)

This note has remained on a wall of Lucca since Christmas: “The Banca del Monte of Lucca wishes a merry Christmas and happy new year to all the customers ruined by them.”

Recently we recounted how the Pisans, invading in 1114 the Muslim Mallorca, took from the mosque of Medina Mayurka – today’s Palma – the two red porphyry columns which today adorn the front door of the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral. The Pisans offered them to Florence as a token of gratitude for the Florentines’ having defended in the absence of the Pisan army the city of Pisa from any perfidious intention of the neighboring Lucca. The truth is that in those years the Pisan army often undertook various adventures, especially by sea, from where they returned with a rich booty. Not so those of Lucca who chose to make their (fabulous) fortune by the arts of diplomacy, shrewdness, industry (mostly silk), finances and speculations. The mint of Lucca was the only one who dared to coin a currency with the portrait of Christ (we will soon understand why), and this currency often served as a reference value all over the medieval and Renaissance Europe, as it is attested by phrases like “L’oro di Bologna a passar da Lucca si vergogna” – “The gold of Bologna is ashamed when passing through Lucca”.

Another memorable booty of the Pisan army is from the time of the first crusade, from where they returned with the precious relics of St. Nicodemus, now preserved in the Cathedral of Pisa. Nicodemus was a member of the Sanhedrin, and the Gospel of John reports on his conversion to Christ and his contribution with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloe to embalming the body of Christ. However, at the same time the inhabitants of Lucca did not need to leave the safety and quiet of their town on the banks of the Serchio to obtain even better relics. The story is recounted like this by the De inventione, revelatione ac translatione Sanctissimi Vultu:

After Nicodemus helped Joseph of Arimathea to take down Christ from the cross and to prepare His body for burial, he wanted to make a wooden sculpture that would preserve the living memory of the body and face of Christ. He carved the body, but then hesitated and did not dare to begin to form the head. Tired and sad for the difficulty of the task, he fell asleep. While sleeping, angels finished the work. It is said that after Nicodemus was martyred, the crucifix remained forgotten for generations, hidden deep in a cave, until an angel appeared to the good bishop Subalpinus, and told him to go to the Mount Kidron where he would find the sculpture in the cave. The angel also commanded him to immediately build a tabernacle in the form of a ship, put the crucifix inside and let it on the sea, as God would lead it to its destination. When the bishop let the ship on the waves, a gentle wind arose with a special aroma, as if all the spices of the world had been united. And the ship arrived to the Tuscan coast, where it was spotted by a Genoese ship who wanted to seize it, but in vain they chased it for several days, they could not get even near to it. In the end, they reached it in the port of Luni, but again they tried to get on it without success for several days. The bishop of Luni then offered a large reward to whoever could catch the ship, but it was all in vain. Meanwhile, the bishop of Lucca was visited by another angel who said him: “Gather your people and go with them to the beach of Luni to receive the gift that God sends you. And do not forget to be generous with the Bishop of Luni when you see what is inside the cross.” When the good bishop of Lucca with his entourage arrived in Luni, where already all the sailors were laying exhausted, the first they did was to kneel down and pray in the sand. And suddenly a scented air arose, as if all the flowers of the world had been united, and the ship came by itself near to them. The bishop pulled it from the sea with his own hand as if it weighed less than a feather, opened its seals and found in it the tabernacle of the True Cross and the Holy Face carved by St. Nicodemus with the help of angels. Then he looked inside the cross and found a scroll with its history, and another with the story of its discovery by Bishop Subalpinus, furthermore a piece of the crown of thorns, a remnant of the garment of Christ, a nail from His cross, a phial with the blood of Christ and the Holy Shroud. The bishop of Lucca gave the phial with the Holy Blood to the bishop of Luni. But, as expected, it was not enough to settle the arguments over the ownership of the venerable objects. Thus the bishop of Lucca proposed that, as it happened until then, the will of God should decide. They put the tabernacle and all its contents in a chariot drawn by two white oxen, and the beasts without hesitation took the road to Lucca and did not stop until they reached the door of the church of Saint Martin. And so the Volto Santo has since become a symbol and religious focus of Lucca and the origin of their great feasts, and its image adorns the currency of the city of Lucca.

The fact is that in Catalonia you can hear the same story. The inhabitants of the town of Balaguer argue that it is they who preserve the Christ of Nicodemus which came floating on the waves of the sea from Beirut where it had been hiding, to the delta of the Ebro, then upstream the river and its tributary, the little Segre to the town of Balaguer along the river. Also in this case, God allowed only to the abbess of the Poor Clares to take it out of the water and to keep it in the church. Perhaps this anecdote highlights a difference between Italy, which has always succeeded in exploiting its symbolic resources, and Spain – in this case, Catalonia – where there is a greater tendency to put things away, to keep reticence and, ultimately, to be along history always some steps behind Italy. A proof is the great reputation of the Volto Santo of Lucca as opposed to the Cristo of Balaguer, which is barely known by the villages of the region.

Lucca is always worth a visit, especially in September, during the feast of La Luminara
celebrated in honor of the Volto Santo. We were there on a quiet
Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago.

Since our posts are usually heavily loaded with images, on the first page of río Wang you can see only the most recent four or five posts. Let us therefore have here this back door for a quick overview of all the posts.

If the stunning beauty of the country, the kindness of the people, the multitude of historic monuments, and the great Iranian cuisine were widely known, we would not be able to step away from the many tourists.

At this time Private Károly Timó spends the last weeks of the recovery period unexpectedly allotted to him, thanks to the “thousand crowns shot”, in the earlier mentioned hospital in Molnár Street, Budapest.

The photos, by Georgian boys leaving for the Great War, were left to their parents and brothers, so they would remember them after they died somewhere in Galicia, the Hungarian Carpathians, or under Przemyśl.

As he moves through the rooms of his home, he gradually unfolds the fabric of his life, keeping a delicate balance between the detailed technical description of the objects, and a self-critical revelation of himself.

The ideology of Moscow fought with a special devotion against all values and symbols of the United States, also including jeans, and therefore the Soviet citizens considered, that where there are jeans, there is happiness.

Budapest is covered by freshly fallen snow, ice patches on the street, as we start off for our midnight flight. In Kutaisi, it is fifteen degrees Celsius, and the oranges blossom on the photos of the Russian bloggers.

As an underground system, the metro is necessarily a space apart from the happier face of the city in sunlight, being confined beneath it to dark, meandering passages, and comprising a Hades, an underworld.

A childhood dream. Freshly fallen snow, a walk on the hillside in the twilight, on the crunching snow, the light of the candelabra dissolving as the milk loaf, the sound of the snow being bumped off the branches.

The enemy is us. And our Christmas has just been presented in the exhibition Auguri dal Fronte, “Greetings from the Front”, at the Palazzo Corner Mocenigo in Venice, by the Cats Museum of Cattaro/Kotor.

That the soldiers of the Second World War, in spite to any earlier notion, mass-produced private photos, has become a well-known fact for more than two decades, mainly due to the German war photo exhibitions.

The exhibition documents the fate of the 2nd Hungarian Army, sent to the Don Bend, from their leaving through the Voronezh breakthrough of the Red Army until the return of the surviving soldiers in April 1943.

Ivan Vladimirov’s most expressive and realistic works are his documentary sketches from 1917-1918. During this period he worked at the Petrograd police, and was actively involved in its daily activities.

Yesterday, on the concert of the Muzsikás Ensemble, the musicians told about how they collected from old Transylvanian and Moldovan musicians the repertoire of the Jewish folk music once played by them.

It is not so much for the little sentimental story pointed to a moral lesson, but rather for the fine-toned watercolors painted thirty years ago by Lisbeth Zwerger, that we publish this Christmas story.

We do not know whether the Front of Liberation of Vietnam exhausted from the Soviet example or from their own inspiration to distribute to the American soldiers passports enhancing the voluntary surrender.

“This is how the story of the brave Moravian brothers became part of the history of the Monarchy, and this is how it was amalgamated with the traditions of two nations. with which they originally had nothing to do.”

As this region of Southern Podolia was part of the Ottoman Empire between 1667 and 1699, its Jewish population was strongly influenced by the pseudo-Messiah of Smyrna, Sabbatai Zevi, whose movement lived its heyday just then.

Alexander Roinashvili was born in 1846 in Dusheti, not far from the Georgian Military Road. We do not know how he discovered photography, but I imagine him posing, as a teenager, in front of an itinerant photographer.

In 1856 the wealthy Armenian merchant of Tiflis, Vardan Arshakuni gave commission to the architect G. Ivanov for a small building that had to be both intimate and original: the palace Arshakuni. Really original, he specified. And intimate.

And the traveler says goodbye to József Kovács, who claims himself a Little Russian, was a Czech soldier, believes himself to be a Calvinist, but he is in fact a Greek Catholic, and he is Russian not after his father, but his mother, who, however “was a Hungarian”.

Three thousand kilometers, seven days, one hundred and twenty waking hours, a dozen visited places, a thousand adventures. Nineteen people who lived through all of this, and who report on their impressions below.

Ghosts can become not only the unsuspecting passers-by, who are forever captured on the glass plate of the camera in front of the old buildings. But also the buildings themselves, whole streets and neighborhoods.

Select the Hungarian-English option of Google Translator. Copy/type in the left-side/Hungarian field the name of the Hungarian National Library: “Széchényi Könyvtár”. Check how this is translated by the doorkeeper.

A German tourist on his way to Greece passes in the night by the art nouveau spa of Szabadka-Palics, and hits a kangaroo that escaped from the Palics zoo. Soon the police arrives, and a black policeman gets out of the jeep.

The flea market in Odessa is in the center of the Moldavanka, on the Starokonny, that is, Old Horse Fair Street, although the last one who bought here a horse was the carter Pogrom Mendel, Benya Krik’s father.

Walking all the morning in the Moldavanka, looking for the traces of Babel. The Moldavanka is not any more the gangland it once was. True, the house of Misha Yaponchik is still standing, with Benya Krik’s dove-cot in the courtyard.

And how many good used bricks are there. For example these with the inscription RKF. A huge amount of them. Sometimes people come and buy of them, to build them into the garage or the fence, for decoration.

Andrzej Bobola is one of the most popular Polish saints, the Martyr of Poland. He was captured by the Cossacks as a missionary during the Bohdan Khmelnytsky uprising, brutally tortured and finally murdered.

In the conversations with our readers and fellow travelers, the ideas of the following travels have been outlined for the rest of 2012. It depends on the number of applicants which one will be really launched.

– Glory to Ukraine! – Glory to its heroes! – replies the guard armed with a machine gun from the other side of the peep hole. The reinforced door opens. The guest, who knew the password, can enter the restaurant.

In Britain it has been raining for four months. The advertisements, which encouraged to saving water in the critical shortage situation after the two past years of drought, were first faded out and then slowly washed away by the rain.

Under the pretext of the above mentioned post I present two books on the attempt of Sarajevo where the pictures are not only cut, but also cut together, and the omissions are also absolutely characteristic.

The Bibliothèque Nationale, however, preserves photo albums not only on the army of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but also on those of other contemporary great powers. For example, of the Russian Empire.

Poverty, vulnerability, misery. Such dramatic images on the Gypsies of Western Europe, primarily of the Netherlands, from the 1930s to the 1960s, which we are accustomed to only from Romania, Bulgaria or Yugoslavia.

The old towns of Lwów and Odessa are really similar to each other in many ways. Primarily because of that eclectic and Art Nouveau style which at that time was a common language of this region from Vienna to Baku

In the houses that once saw better days, a number of renowned figures of the city lived in the golden age of Odessa. Their memory is preserved only by the walls and by the various sites compiled by the local lovers of the city.

After the highly successful tour in Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv in May, as we have described in detail, a number of new journeys began to take shape to the sites of the Central and Eastern European Jewish heritage.

As it was the landmark in the outskirts of the city at which the traveler leaving Budapest cast a last glance, so the name of Ostapenko became more and more known and merged with its immediate environment.

An estimated 12.000 Hungarian soldiers went as far as Denmark, to take over the places of the German soldiers, and virtually provided various tasks of guarding under the command of the German invaders.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the era of horse railways, flag-officer György Adorján etched into the clinker wall of the University during the probably boring hours of his job whatever just came to him.

The movie focuses on the football match played on 9 August 1942 in Kiev’s Zenit stadium, where the soldiers of the Wehrmacht (“Flakelf”) and the players of the dissolved Dinamo Kiev (“FC Start”) clashed with each other.

This is how they imagined at the turn of the past century how Budapest would look ten thousand years later, when the finally dried up Danube would dig itself into the depth of a canyon in the former river bed.

In one piece of the futuristic postcard series issued by the Einem chocolate factory we find among the several technical wonders of the year of 2259 a surprisingly old-fashioned vehicle: a conventional fire truck.

One must be cautious with the spread-out sheets: as photogenic they are, as trivial they can become on the photo. However, Zsófi Porkoláb’s spreading-out blog helps to discover how much new is in them.

Einem was wise enough to date the pictures not to the late 20th century, but to as far as 2259. And indeed, who knows whether the unforeseen anomalies of 20th-century development would not be really adjusted by then?

We recently found in a downtown street of Paris this graffiti, a modernized and stylized version of the topos popularized, among others, by the following emblem in Daniel Heinsius’ Emblemata amatoria (Leiden, 1613).

The steps rattle down the wooden stairs from the height of two floors while I set light. The man draws back behind the column – there, you see? – and waits until I click. “Kommen, Madonna!” he says then excitedly.

The Elisabeth Bridge in Budapest was blown up on 18 January 1945 by the retreating German troops. The press of György Klösz and his son, one of the most important publishers of Hungarian city views was nationalized in 1948.

We are walking about Budapest with Araz, and I am also discovering the city with his eyes, noticing how many Muslim mihrabs, prayer niches turned towards Mekka have survived in the Christian churches from the period of the Ottoman domination (1541-1686).

I come back from hiking in the Bucegi, where Corporal Mușat is standing over the former Hungarian border. I pass in front of the Iron Székely on the main square of Székelyudvarhely, now Odorheiu Secuiesc. This is how the two statues make one complete story to me.

The den genre which was a great success yesterday, has several further classics as well. Let us show one of our favorites, the bear tales by Barbara Firth, without any comment: the pictures and text speak for themselves.

It’s two years now that I have presented the tale whose protagonist, the fox spends its time in various attractive dens, just like the ones into which I as a child have imagined myself on the basis of a popular picture book presenting the animals living under earth.

In the last entry we have belittled the northern Iranian tourist attraction, the village of Masouleh in comparison to the Bakhtiari mountain village, and now we would like to somehow make amends for this offense.

…still today migrate by millions from the summer grasslands to the winter ones, from the valleys up the mountains, along spectacular roads, swimming over rapid mountain rivers together with their flocks, as it was shown in the first Iranian ethnographic film, the Grass (1925).

Now we will visit a corner of Lwów which, I guess, was completely unknown or only superficially known to most of the inhabitants of the city. This part of Lwów was the Jewish quarter in the northern part of the old Lwów.

It is just obvious that the source of the 16th-century Flores romanas cannot be anything else but Zhang Hua’s (A.D. 232-300) Relation on the things of the world which must have been brought to Mallorca by Zheng He’s fleet in 1421.

The “I’ve Taken It To Pieces” project – “something just a bit, but something to the extreme, because the Lord has given a screwdriver in my hand” – fits quite well to the retronautic, fact-finding and creative thread of Río Wang.

The predecessor of slides is the magic lantern, which is the combination of a projecting equipment and a series of images painted on glass. It is an exceptional luck when such glasses and equipments turn up.

István Békeffy and Viktor Bánky in 1939 interwove into a new Daróczy-Hunnia production, the film Áll a bál (“The party is on”) a Warsaw thread, which otherwise would have not been necessary to the logic of the story.

The town of Nagybecskerek (Hungarian), Bečkerek (Serbian), Großbetschkerek (German), Becicherecul Mare (Rumanian), that is, the current Zrenjanin in Serbia was surrounded by large swamps already in this detail of the Tabula Hungariae, of ca. 1528.

We would like to present three series of photos connected with the Revolution, taken by three recognized Chinese artists. All three were exposed in the 百年印象 Băinián Yìnxiàng, “A Hundred Years of Impressions” photo gallery of Beijin in recent years.

Beijing photographers 黄庆军 Huáng Qìngjūn (1971) and 马宏杰 Mă Hóngjié (1963) have been roaming about all China for years by trying to persuade a family in each province – it’s not easy, they say – to put off all their stuff in front of the house.

We were looking for photos to the reconstruction of the old Beijing which has been systematically destroyed since the 1950s, and this is how we found this series of several hundreds of color photos, taken by by Dmitri Kessel for LIFE in 1946.

This republic lays beyond the little river of Vilnius, in the former ghetto, populated after the deportation of the Jews first by the underworld and the city’s poorest residents, and then, from the 70’s onwards, an increasing number of penniless artists.

Una SOPA muy negra, a very black soup served on our table by the U.S. lawmakers, we commented it the other day in Studiolum, in whose working language, the noble castellano, this pun offers itself spontaneously.

“I’m sitting in the courtyard, looking forward to my friend, to congratulate him on the birth of his newborn son. Old house, dark courtyard, a couch on the yard. My friend appears in the opening of the gate, with a cradle in the hand.”

The great voyage is not the one that takes you far or lasts long. The great voyage is the one about which you feel the need to write a diary or a logbook, a travel blog, mirabilia Urbis and Milione, even if you ultimately fail to do so.

Snow is mentioned in the Bible only once. Benaiah, son of Jehoiada killed a lion on the day when snow fell (2Sam 20:23). The two extraordinary events mutually reinforced each other in historical memory.

When I saw for the first time a photo on the barracks suburb of Taichung in Taiwan, I thought it was founded by the members of the native tribes descending into the city from the mountains of central Taiwan.

Two years ago, on 3 January the Muromtsev Dacha was put to fire in Moscow’s Tsaritsino district. The bloggers who defended the house for months against the authorities speculating for the estate, have commemorated the anniversary.

The Langhe are a large hill region in the north-west of Italy, a land of corpulent wines and people accustomed to hard work, a scene of many wars, from the Napoleonic campaigns to the partisans’ Resistenza.

On Christmas Eve 1911 the Milanese weekly Letture della Domenica. Settimanale Illustrato gave news that finally, thanks to the genius of two brothers from Turin, it was possible to cross any river or lake without getting off the bike.

Since my childhood it has been incomprehensible to me why the piglet and the chimney sweep, these inevitable figures of New Year greeting cards, gambling money and card calendars are considered luck-bringer around the end of the year.

Hundred and three years ago, on 28 December 1908 the most powerful ever recorded earthquake in Europe shook the city of Messina in Sicily, and within minutes a twelve-meter tsunami swept across the coast.

One could ask the question again: when were these pictures taken? But we already know that we must be careful. A careful fading throws back by decades even the photos taken yesterday, especially if nothing changed during these decades.

Soon, in mid-January, when the feasts of Saint Anthony – about which we have already written – arrive, the Albufera of Alcúdia will give again its (already almost negligible) share of the island’s eel consumption.

Around this region of Europe it is not unusual for someone past ninety-nine to have been citizen of five or six countries without having ever moved, say, from Rimavská Sobota. The same holds for the houses.

Bulgakov in one of his harshest satires on the new Soviet regime, the Heart of a Dog (1925) describes how a devout and grateful stray dog becomes after the implantation of a human pituitary a pretentious and primitive Soviet proletarian.

From the color slides by Branson DeCou made during his Russian journey in 1931 we have already seen those made in Moscow and in the two former imperial palace complexes next to Leningrad, Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo.

Lwów still faithfully preserves the memory of those days when in the panoramic Friendship Bookstore the books of all the friendly countries were available. But once Lwów also was the capital of the Polish book.

We have recently found, in a series of hitherto unknown photos on the División Azul in the Soviet front, the following surprising photo on which the Spanish soldiers entertain themselves with «saloon bullfight».

Among the Soviet temperance posters the most iconic is undoubtedly the one created by I. Govorkov in 1954, when the anti-alcohol campaign, after twenty-five year interval, flared up again after Stalin’s death.

Murat Reis – that is, Admiral – was already born in Rhodes, in a Muslim Albanian family settled on the island. Since the age of twelve he served under the greatest Ottoman admirals, Turgut Reis, Piri Reis and Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha.

In the village consisting of three streets and a few dozen houses every family cut sheep for the greatest Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, or as they call it in Turkic and Persian regions, Kurban Bayram, the festival of sacrifice.

When traveling from east to west along the northern shore of lake Balaton, before entering the tiny village of Balatonudvari, you can see to the right a strange cemetery with huge, archaic, white round gravestones.

Among the several photographers capturing the accident at Gare Montparnasse, Henri Roger-Viollet (1869-1946), with whose photo we started the previous post, was certainly the most renowned and most refined one.

– Is it difficult to take photos of railway stations? – It is easier than anything else – Švejk said –, because it does not move. The station always stands on its place, and you do not have to remind it that you want a friendly face…”

On the Kremlin which you will never see any more, because it was systematically destroyed in the 1930s together with a great part of old Moscow, you can create a picture for yourself on the basis of the photos of the last Tsar’s coronation ceremony in 1896.

The second half of the 19th century passed both in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and in the neighboring countries by covering their own territory as well as those of the neighbors with detailed maps which were suitable for military tasks.

Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a poet and an activist (to whom the verses cited in this post have been dedicated), recalls how she gasped when Senderov suggested her to give a talk on any literary subject as long as it was a tabooed subject.

From the 1956’s Moscow Jacques Dupâquier flew on to Tashkent, the center of the Uzbek autonomous republic. It appears that there he enjoyed the same freedom in sightseeing and taking photos as in the capital.

Today 69 years ago was published in Simferopol this German-Russian phrasebook, whose content, as the introduction says, “was determined by the practical needs of the German and Russian users who today are in close contact with each other.”

“With the return of a part of Transylvania to our thousand year old homeland, apart from our dear Hungarian brothers and sisters a significant Romanian minority has also returned. My book aims at the easy mastery of the language of this minority.”

My first step for the Einem Cookie, late 19th c. The candy factory established in 1851 by Theodor Ferdinand von Einem on the Arbat moved in the late 19th century to the Moscow Island, where the little girl is jumping to.

The Hungarian Language and Science portal yesterday published a detailed analysis on a recently found Russian-Hungarian glossary, which was apparently compiled to facilitate the basic communication with the Soviet occupation forces.

The commanders of the Tsar’s army held a last survey over their forces, and then, led by the mountain rifles of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, they marched to the monument of the Austro-Hungarian soldiers fallen between 1914 and 1918.

Some politicians and the media of the Balearic Islands from time to time – especially when elections are approaching – try to play out the card of the supposed linguistic problems of the autonomous region.

At the same time with the London exhibition of early 20th-century Hungarian photography, in June opened and in October closed in the Crimean Sevastopol the exhibition of the photos made seventy years ago by Yevgeny Khaldei.

In the yard of antiquarian books of the Istanbul Grand Bazaar, where black jinns are hitting with burning hammers the aching tooth from inside on the miniatures of Ottoman medical manuscripts, the statue of a turbaned man is standing.

Ivan Vasilevich Boldyrev was born in 1850 in a Cossack family, in the village of Ternovskoe along the Don. Since his mother died early and his father served in the Tsar’s Cossack division, he grew up almost as an orphan in his grandfather’s house.

The six thousand strong Kichmengsky Gorodok, simply called by its inhabitants Little Town Kich, is located in the historical Russian region’s northeasternmost province Vologda, and namely in its easternmost district.

In the 1890s, with the appearance of the “safety bicycle”, the bike, for the very first time, ceased to be a caprice of young sportsmen, and became an everyday transport tool and – with the development of railroads – even a kind of a one-man branch-line for commuters.

Sapa, laying two thousand meters high among the North Vietnamese mountains, is one of the most romantic regions of the country. In the inaccessible valleys a large number of little peoples and particular languages have survived from before the Chinese and Vietnamese conquests.

Ten photos have been published in these days on the Russian net, on several sites within a short time, ten rather faded color photos from October 1941, on the Baby Yar mass murder, two weeks before the seventieth anniversary of Baby Yar.

It is not easy to photograph the market. It is hard to overcome the allure of genre scenes, the charm of exoticism, the commonplaces of orientalism, the temptation to grasp this whole buzz at once, and in the end nothing remains in our hands.

Exactly two weeks have passed since we have asked our readers to help us to collect the minimum amount of 1,500 euros necessary to our friends in Szék/Sic (Romania) to move before the coming winter in the new house.

The gently waving hills of eastern Galicia, still green at the end of August, are even more softened by the afternoon light. This light and this air are the protagonists of the first book by Bruno Schulz, The Cinnamon Shops.

But this formula, when the little man increases the greatness of the figure by his own smallness, and draws safety and support for his smallness from the greatness of the figure, was fertile only for some decades.

After the Bartholomew’s Day commemoration we climb up to Felszeg to see the houses that fell into ruin in last July, and then descend to the market place to see how our friends proceed with their new house.

A Russian version of the very newspaper of the National Socialist Party, the Völkischer Beobachter was distributed in a large number of copies in Moscow several years before the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Lwów, Львів, Lemberg, לעמבערג, Լվովի, Львов, Liov, Ľvov, Lvov, Лвов, Lavov, Leopolis, Léopol, Leopoli, Ilyvó. Only a few European cities – Venice, Rome, Paris, London – have their own names in so many languages.

The circumstances of Federico García Lorca’s death were surrounded by uncertainty and legends over a long time. A few weeks ago appeared Miguel Caballero Pérez’s The thirteen last hours of Lorca’s life.

“Look, the tiger of Ussuri came this year to pull us out of every evil plague, to devour the American crisis, to distribute happiness and love to all, to bring all kinds of riches in this Happy New Year!”

While we are cycling upstream along the Danube, we do not want to leave our readers out of the pleasures of wild waters either. Fedor Telkov somewhere in Russia asks the fishermen about how big was the biggest catch of their lives.

In the preface of the first European Atlas by Gerhard Mercator (1512-1594), whose author did not live to see the complete publication of his great work, a warning is borrowed from Saint Isidore of Seville.

prohibido el cante, this was written in several suburban pubs in the Franco era. And this is the title of the exhibition which the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo of Seville dedicated in 2009 to the forbidden song, the flamenco.

A friend from Portugal has sent us this photo of a group of «indignados» from the Praça do Rossio in Lisbon. Suddenly a late spring rain forced them to find shelter under the large canvas banner they were displaying.

in all quantities, sizes, shapes, colors. The very first thing one encounters when exiting the Istanbul airport is the poster of the Armine fashion company showing a pretty young woman with a kerchief.

The first picture is published on the Old Picture of the Day blog. Its caption leaves no doubt as to what we see: the traffic police fines the irresponsibly racing velocipedist. After all, we do not live in the jungle!

Is it possible to take photos of the darkness? In the latest edition of the Spanish Babelia Antonio Muñoz Molina writes about the photo historical exhibition Night Vision: Photography After Dark, recently opened in the Metropolitan Museum.

I apologize and thank you for the invitation to such an important Art Exhibition, but I’ve given it some thought. I don’t believe Italy needs me for being represented, and I’d feel like a cat at a dog show or viceversa.

It is not unusual in the history of civilization to discover one thing twice, either because it fell into oblivion, or because the initiates deliberately kept it in secret. This happened to the bike as well.

They believe that hurdy gurdy must be just turned, but no, it is exactly like the “manual piano”. If you have no practice and no feeling inside, then there is no “Takt”, and the song does not make any sense.

…for a good pasta with soft cheese – sang the pre-WWII hit. And deservedly so. Because the baroque suburb of Óbuda in the northernmost outskirt of Budapest was the paradise of little bohemian restaurants.

I can still remember as we set out in the asphalt jungle of Józsefváros, looking for horseshoe nails. We knew that they are sometimes lost by the industrious horses of Pest off their legs covered with gamashes of hair.

The opening image provides an understanding of why we post this fin-de-siècle children’s games series after the previous post on child carriages. But these photos are also related, for example, to the “heads or tails” played in Siberia.

Recently we recounted how the Pisans, invading in 1114 the Muslim Mallorca, took from the mosque of Medina Mayurka – today’s Palma – the two red porphyry columns which today adorn the front door of the Baptistery of Florence.

Mehr ve mâh, مهر و ماه in Persian means the sun and the moon, and in a figurative sense the day which is equally shared by the sun and the moon: the equinox, 21st of March, the day of the Spring New Year that is Noruz.

We surmise that Lieutenant Wladimir Astafiew was an officer navigator, for on the plinth reverse is written “поручик корпуса флотских штурманов”, that is, “Lieutenant of the Corps of Naval Navigators”.

I originally intended to post this call with the title “Tell me a secret”, but then I thought that with the city’s name in the title it would raise more the attention of the target audience: the inhabitants and lovers of Istanbul.

The little Gothic courtyard opening from Carrer dels Lledó is a jewel box not only in a metaphoric sense. But the jewel shop and exhibition room Atelier Hàbit is just as hidden within it as the house itself.

The Italian soldier who is on guard against nothing and commenting on himself in the caption is Carlo Manfrini, nineteen years old at that time. Manfrini’s Russian photos have been kept for many years in his home near Bologna.

The Ermita de Sant Llorenç was built as a chapel in the 13th century on the most important point of Mallorca’s northwestern corner, along the road coming from the sanctuary and pilgrimage site of Lluc.

The following commentary to the above image was written by the Occitan musician Miquèu Montanaro originally in French, accompanied by the Hungarian Ghymes from Slovakia and the Serbian Vujicsics from Hungary.

The Passatge Bacardi, which connects the Rambla with Barcelona’s secret heart, the Plaza Real was built by the same Molina i Casamajó, chief architect of the town’s urban planning, who also designed the whole Plaza Real.

Do you remember when a year ago we presented an open letter written by the vice-president of the co-governing right wing party of Slovakia in defense of the Slovak language which she felt to be in a serious danger?

One-way, as if a New Year’s greeting, has posted some beautiful old pictures on violin players, thus giving me an excuse to publish some long-preserved photos as well as the most beautiful song I have ever heard on a fiddler.

One of the finest examples of the winter metaphor comes from Iran, from one of the greatest Iranian poets of the 20th century, Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1928-1990), of whom we have already translated some poems.

To be Transylvanians means to be Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Armenians, Calvinists, Lutherans, Jews and Unitarians; it means to be cheek by jowl Romanians, Hungarians, Slavs, Saxons, Armenians.

The windows of the recently opened second floor auditorium of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences overlook the Danube and the Castle of Buda. The scene is a serious competitor of the lecturers.

Alter Kacyzne (1885-1941) was born in the Kresy – the eastern region of Poland which after WWII was annected by the Soviet Union – just like Kipnis. He was also a writer, poet, journalist, and photographer.

“Estampitas” literally means “small prints”, but in everyday life it is used for the popular little holy images used as bookmarks in prayer books or distributed by the priest after the Mass to the altar boys.

Each time we go to Galicia we admire the granite of the buildings, the strength of the rough stone cut into large blocks, giving a feeling of weight and eternal stability to the constructions and pavements.

It had been well known since the works of St. Augustine and St. Isidor of Seville that every language came from the Hebrew Ursprache of the Paradise which was divided only after the enterprise of Babel.

Sándor Kégl already at high school read all literature in the original – Latin, Greek, German, English, French, Italian – languages, and he also acquired Russian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese.

A new fellow blogger has joined the most popular Russian blog network ЖЖ. Then new blogger is none but the Ingush General Yunus-bek Yevkurov, Hero of the Russian Federation and President of Ingushetia.

Although it was Sunday, the 77 year old blacksmith Vladimir Khutaba and his eldest son Daur opened the shop for the guest’s sake, and began to prepare the most important iron piece in a traditional Abkhaz household.

We have spent seven days of masterclass by taking photos in Uglich and around – writes Nikolai Gontar –, and in the outskirts I came across this unambiguously historical building in sharp contrast to its surroundings.

Damascus in the 19th century was a sleepy provincial town of the Ottoman empire. It was endowed with some importance only by the meeting of the two main roads of Meccan pilgrimage coming from Anatolia and Persia, respectively.